This past weekend, I went out to my parents' place to help my youngest brother, brother-in-law and father tear out some cabinetry and other items from their kitchen. (My mom likes remodeling houses. A lot. To her credit, she has a good eye for home design; the remodels always look better than what they replace.) Half-day job, for the four of us...I'm happy to help, though I wish I could provide more of it. Fortunately, my brother-in-law enjoys and is very good at this kind of thing, and my youngest brother isn't bad either, and my father, while not inclined to be the next Bob Vila, has owned and dealt with houses long enough that he's picked up some of it by necessity. Me...um, no. Or not heretofore: as I was saying back in the jambalaya-cooking entry, just because I'm not able to do something now doesn't mean I can't learn if I put my mind to it. All natural aptitude does is speed things up.
That being said, I haven't attempted to cook anything in the six weeks since I cooked the jambalaya, either. Most people tend to gravitate toward things they have natural aptitude for and away from things they don't, and I'm probably worse in that regard than most people. I figure it's that we get hooked on the feeling of success, those rushes you get big and small when things click, and after a while we can't do without it. Gotta have that endorphin release or whatever it is. And our culture sure reinforces that outcome-based thinking: we're sent the message from an early age, over and over, that you're either a gold-medal winner or you're a loser, that nothing's worth doing unless you excel at it in the eyes of the world, that those who win are the only ones who matter. We watch American Idol, but we don't sing to each other anymore for fear we might not sound as good as the people on TV.
But does it have to be that way? No, I don't think it does, and I'm trying to get away from that conditioning. It's okay not to be good at something; there's nothing to be embarrassed about. Just give it a shot anyway. How does anyone learn or grow if they just avoid everything that doesn't come easily?
So back to the kitchen work, it went okay with the four of us on the case. Most of it was unscrewing cabinets from the wall. Whoever put them in years before my parents bought the house had done kind of a shoddy job, and many of the screws were stripped, buried or both, so that was the biggest thing slowing us down. To get the countertops off, we also had to remove a bunch of tile with crowbars and hammers (that was actually sort of fun, if messy). And there were electrical wiring issues to contend with. But we were able to get everything out of there.
What made me happy, aside from the cherished company of my family, was that I lost my composure only once and very mildly. You see, in the past, I've tended to get angry with myself when I invariably struggle with things I haven't learned how to do, especially in the company of others who are much better than me at what I'm doing. Some part of me still thinks I should know how to do everything perfectly and wants to scream at me whenever I don't. It doesn't usually cause me to flat-out lose my temper, but now and then it has, and that actually *is* embarrassing for me, much more so than not being good at whatever. But I'm glad to say the screaming perfectionist in me is getting quieter.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Spanish Scrabble
Last weekend my friend Jean and I got to see something live that not many American scrabblers have seen: a tournament in Spanish. A groundbreaking one, at that: the first sanctioned international Spanish tournament held in the United States. There were 14 players - seven from the U.S., six from Mexico and one from Costa Rica. The tournament was held at the home of one of the players who lives here in Austin. We came to be there because one of the players, Travis, is also an expert tournament player in English and one of my good friends in the scene. He came down from Oregon for the occasion. We dropped by around lunchtime and got to meet everyone and see a little bit of the tournament in progress.
Why would Austin be a prime location for a Spanish tournament, you may wonder? The answer is that there are only two Spanish Scrabble clubs in the U.S., and one of them is here. The other is in Miami. The big Spanish Scrabble countries are Argentina, Venezuela and Spain, I gather. Most other South American countries have some presence in the game, Mexico has some but not that much yet, there are a few Caribbean players.
A lot of what I saw and heard reminded me of what I've read about the early days of tournament Scrabble in English. For the most part, Spanish Scrabble has evolved independently of the much larger (but still tiny) English tournament scene. The common point of origin is the box-top rules most people are familiar with, but tournament play by necessity expands and modifies those rules quite a bit...I should add here that, while English Scrabble has had the benefit of 20-25 more years of polishing its rules and practices and it seems clear that Spanish Scrabble would do well to take a look at how we've refined our game, there's nothing wrong with doing many or even most things a little differently. As long as the players are happy and the competition is fair, viva la diferencia (I have no idea whether I'm saying that right...sis?)
Some observations:
- Many things that have been around a long time in the English scene are fairly new to Spanish. For example, Spanish Protiles only recently became available. (For non-Scrabblers reading this, Protiles are the plastic tiles used in official Scrabble play, as opposed to the wooden ones that come with store versions of the game. The difference is that the letters on the plastic tiles aren't indented, so players can't cheat by distinguishing letters or blanks by feeling the tiles in the bag - "brailling" - when they draw.) Before the advent of Protiles, Spanish Scrabble had the rule that you couldn't count for yourself how many tiles were left in the bag; you had to call over a director or helper to do that for you.
- Spanish Scrabble allows each player 30 minutes on the clock instead of the 25 used in English. Not sure what the penalty is for going overtime (in English, it's 10 points per minute) EDIT: just learned it's the same penalty as in English.
- The sequence of a turn is different. In Spanish, you do everything before you hit the clock: place your tiles, add up and announce your score, write your score down, draw new tiles, THEN hit the clock. If an opponent wants to challenge the play, he or she must do so before you draw a replacement tile, as in English. As was the case in English Scrabble early on, the Spanish game has yet to adopt the "hold" rule. There's one more pertinent rule in here: once you place your first tile on the board for a play, you must play in that spot - you can rearrange transposed letters and such, but you can't take your play back or decide to play it somewhere else on the board. This is necessary because otherwise there would be no way to challenge - a player challenged could just take the play back.
As for writing the score down, I'm not absolutely sure about this, but it appears to be a requirement that you write down the main word formed by the play as well. I would support that rule for English Scrabble, to be honest - score checks and recounts are much harder when the players don't write the words down along with the scores.
- Spanish Scrabble is free challenge, so there are a lot of challenges. They have a novel way of addressing the problem of challenging plays frivolously just to buy time to think, which is a problem with free challenge. As is done in England and some other places, but not in North America, challenges are handled by runners. When the runner comes over to take the challenge slip to the computer, he or she brings a piece of square cardboard the size of the game board and covers the board with it so the players cannot study the board while the challenge is being adjudicated. (They also must put their tiles facedown when on neutral time, as we do.)
- Weird rule: score sheets aren't allowed to have the tile distribution preprinted on them. However, there's nothing prohibiting a player from writing the distribution on his or her score sheet manually once the game starts, and most of the better players do so. That sounds alien to an English player now, but in the earliest days of English Scrabble it was debated whether tracking sheets should be allowed and what rules should govern them.
- Spanish Scrabble does have an authoritative list of words like our OWL or CSW, but that's a recent development. The word source has been and still is the Diccionario de Real Academia Espanola (the computer I'm typing on has a weird problem doing special characters, sorry), but before the list, there were a whole bunch of guidelines in their rule book for how to judge from the dictionary whether a word was valid for Scrabble or not. I guess that was true in English in the early days, too.
- Spanish Scrabble has fewer words from 2-5 letters than English does, but many more at longer lengths. I gather this has mostly to do with all the verb conjugations in Spanish - the French list is about like the Spanish one in terms of how many words of each length there are. The effect on the game: more bingos (called "Scrabbles" in Spanish lingo, which makes more sense, I guess; what does "bingo" have to do with Scrabble?) and, at the other end, more racks where exchanging is the right play. There are eleven single-instance tiles in Spanish (we only have JKQXZ), and having an unplayable tile in the endgame is much more common than in English. The supply of vowels is very important, since a rack full of consonants is usually a disaster...Travis says that, in his experience, the English game is markedly more strategy-oriented, though top Spanish players can and do deploy effective strategy and tactics where the situation calls for it.
- Tournaments in Spanish are small and about all of them are opens. There's a huge gap between the top players and everyone else, both in ability and in the way they prepare and play. The stronger players play studiously, but the rank and file players tend not to do so - most of them don't even track tiles, for example. From what I've heard, the same split existed in the early days of English Scrabble also.
- The big tournament in Spanish Scrabble is the world championship, and unlike our every-two-years Worlds that a lot of North Americans don't even care about, they hold it every year. It was in Costa Rica last year, and will be in Mexico City this year.
- It seems like pairing methods are a work in progress in the Spanish game. I saw on a laptop there what looked to be pairing software, but I think it must have been more just record-keeping software. The tournament was re-paired manually after each round. I think they were using some sort of Swiss pairings, but I'm not sure. Maybe one of the tournament software programs used in tournaments in English can be fitted for use in Spanish tournaments too.
- Something English Scrabble players can relate well to: Hasbro sucks. I talked with a few of the Spanish players who were in leadership positions in the game, and they each independently mentioned having called on Hasbro to gauge interest in the Spanish game, only to be haughtily dismissed. One player mentioned proposing a School Scrabble program in Spanish. Hasbro sure loves them some School Scrabble in English - remember, they quit supporting adult tournament Scrabble so they could devote those resources to pushing the kiddie version - but nope, they shot down the idea of Spanish School Scrabble right away. Couldn't be clearer to me why: you can't put the kiddo who wins the Spanish School Scrabble championship on the Jimmy Kimmel Show or wherever and pimp a few extra home sets in the bargain. Lovely.
***
Travis finished the tournament 6-4 ("not bad for a gringo", he added), which should be enough to qualify him to be one of the U.S. representatives at the Spanish world championship. He went last year as well and finished quite respectably for a non-native speaker who'd only been playing the Spanish game for a year or so. What he's doing here is very difficult - I switch-hit between two English word lists, and that's challenging, but at least the smaller list is a subset of the bigger one, so when I play the bigger one I can play every word in the smaller one. And the differences between OWL and Collins are nothing compared to the differences between either one and a list in an entirely different language. Travis did say that he gets tripped up in Spanish Scrabble by his English knowledge sometimes. No surprise there.
Anyway, I really enjoyed getting to see the game and meet everyone, and I'd like to see the English and Spanish scenes get closer. I talked with a couple of people there about the possibility of arranging some joint activity in Austin...be interested to see where that might lead.
Why would Austin be a prime location for a Spanish tournament, you may wonder? The answer is that there are only two Spanish Scrabble clubs in the U.S., and one of them is here. The other is in Miami. The big Spanish Scrabble countries are Argentina, Venezuela and Spain, I gather. Most other South American countries have some presence in the game, Mexico has some but not that much yet, there are a few Caribbean players.
A lot of what I saw and heard reminded me of what I've read about the early days of tournament Scrabble in English. For the most part, Spanish Scrabble has evolved independently of the much larger (but still tiny) English tournament scene. The common point of origin is the box-top rules most people are familiar with, but tournament play by necessity expands and modifies those rules quite a bit...I should add here that, while English Scrabble has had the benefit of 20-25 more years of polishing its rules and practices and it seems clear that Spanish Scrabble would do well to take a look at how we've refined our game, there's nothing wrong with doing many or even most things a little differently. As long as the players are happy and the competition is fair, viva la diferencia (I have no idea whether I'm saying that right...sis?)
Some observations:
- Many things that have been around a long time in the English scene are fairly new to Spanish. For example, Spanish Protiles only recently became available. (For non-Scrabblers reading this, Protiles are the plastic tiles used in official Scrabble play, as opposed to the wooden ones that come with store versions of the game. The difference is that the letters on the plastic tiles aren't indented, so players can't cheat by distinguishing letters or blanks by feeling the tiles in the bag - "brailling" - when they draw.) Before the advent of Protiles, Spanish Scrabble had the rule that you couldn't count for yourself how many tiles were left in the bag; you had to call over a director or helper to do that for you.
- Spanish Scrabble allows each player 30 minutes on the clock instead of the 25 used in English. Not sure what the penalty is for going overtime (in English, it's 10 points per minute) EDIT: just learned it's the same penalty as in English.
- The sequence of a turn is different. In Spanish, you do everything before you hit the clock: place your tiles, add up and announce your score, write your score down, draw new tiles, THEN hit the clock. If an opponent wants to challenge the play, he or she must do so before you draw a replacement tile, as in English. As was the case in English Scrabble early on, the Spanish game has yet to adopt the "hold" rule. There's one more pertinent rule in here: once you place your first tile on the board for a play, you must play in that spot - you can rearrange transposed letters and such, but you can't take your play back or decide to play it somewhere else on the board. This is necessary because otherwise there would be no way to challenge - a player challenged could just take the play back.
As for writing the score down, I'm not absolutely sure about this, but it appears to be a requirement that you write down the main word formed by the play as well. I would support that rule for English Scrabble, to be honest - score checks and recounts are much harder when the players don't write the words down along with the scores.
- Spanish Scrabble is free challenge, so there are a lot of challenges. They have a novel way of addressing the problem of challenging plays frivolously just to buy time to think, which is a problem with free challenge. As is done in England and some other places, but not in North America, challenges are handled by runners. When the runner comes over to take the challenge slip to the computer, he or she brings a piece of square cardboard the size of the game board and covers the board with it so the players cannot study the board while the challenge is being adjudicated. (They also must put their tiles facedown when on neutral time, as we do.)
- Weird rule: score sheets aren't allowed to have the tile distribution preprinted on them. However, there's nothing prohibiting a player from writing the distribution on his or her score sheet manually once the game starts, and most of the better players do so. That sounds alien to an English player now, but in the earliest days of English Scrabble it was debated whether tracking sheets should be allowed and what rules should govern them.
- Spanish Scrabble does have an authoritative list of words like our OWL or CSW, but that's a recent development. The word source has been and still is the Diccionario de Real Academia Espanola (the computer I'm typing on has a weird problem doing special characters, sorry), but before the list, there were a whole bunch of guidelines in their rule book for how to judge from the dictionary whether a word was valid for Scrabble or not. I guess that was true in English in the early days, too.
- Spanish Scrabble has fewer words from 2-5 letters than English does, but many more at longer lengths. I gather this has mostly to do with all the verb conjugations in Spanish - the French list is about like the Spanish one in terms of how many words of each length there are. The effect on the game: more bingos (called "Scrabbles" in Spanish lingo, which makes more sense, I guess; what does "bingo" have to do with Scrabble?) and, at the other end, more racks where exchanging is the right play. There are eleven single-instance tiles in Spanish (we only have JKQXZ), and having an unplayable tile in the endgame is much more common than in English. The supply of vowels is very important, since a rack full of consonants is usually a disaster...Travis says that, in his experience, the English game is markedly more strategy-oriented, though top Spanish players can and do deploy effective strategy and tactics where the situation calls for it.
- Tournaments in Spanish are small and about all of them are opens. There's a huge gap between the top players and everyone else, both in ability and in the way they prepare and play. The stronger players play studiously, but the rank and file players tend not to do so - most of them don't even track tiles, for example. From what I've heard, the same split existed in the early days of English Scrabble also.
- The big tournament in Spanish Scrabble is the world championship, and unlike our every-two-years Worlds that a lot of North Americans don't even care about, they hold it every year. It was in Costa Rica last year, and will be in Mexico City this year.
- It seems like pairing methods are a work in progress in the Spanish game. I saw on a laptop there what looked to be pairing software, but I think it must have been more just record-keeping software. The tournament was re-paired manually after each round. I think they were using some sort of Swiss pairings, but I'm not sure. Maybe one of the tournament software programs used in tournaments in English can be fitted for use in Spanish tournaments too.
- Something English Scrabble players can relate well to: Hasbro sucks. I talked with a few of the Spanish players who were in leadership positions in the game, and they each independently mentioned having called on Hasbro to gauge interest in the Spanish game, only to be haughtily dismissed. One player mentioned proposing a School Scrabble program in Spanish. Hasbro sure loves them some School Scrabble in English - remember, they quit supporting adult tournament Scrabble so they could devote those resources to pushing the kiddie version - but nope, they shot down the idea of Spanish School Scrabble right away. Couldn't be clearer to me why: you can't put the kiddo who wins the Spanish School Scrabble championship on the Jimmy Kimmel Show or wherever and pimp a few extra home sets in the bargain. Lovely.
***
Travis finished the tournament 6-4 ("not bad for a gringo", he added), which should be enough to qualify him to be one of the U.S. representatives at the Spanish world championship. He went last year as well and finished quite respectably for a non-native speaker who'd only been playing the Spanish game for a year or so. What he's doing here is very difficult - I switch-hit between two English word lists, and that's challenging, but at least the smaller list is a subset of the bigger one, so when I play the bigger one I can play every word in the smaller one. And the differences between OWL and Collins are nothing compared to the differences between either one and a list in an entirely different language. Travis did say that he gets tripped up in Spanish Scrabble by his English knowledge sometimes. No surprise there.
Anyway, I really enjoyed getting to see the game and meet everyone, and I'd like to see the English and Spanish scenes get closer. I talked with a couple of people there about the possibility of arranging some joint activity in Austin...be interested to see where that might lead.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
About that schedule...
Today at breakfast, I was looking at the 1965 NFL season on pro-football-reference.com. Striking find of the day: The Cleveland Browns that year made it to the NFL championship game, losing to the Packers 23-12. The Packers, of course, had a winning record that year - and they were the ONLY Browns opponent to do so! That's right: all 14 of the Browns' opponents had finished the year 7-7 or worse.
How did this happen? The NFL back then, pre-merger with the AFL, had 14 teams, seven in the East division and seven in the West. Teams played 14 games, 12 in their own division and just two against the opposite division. The standings show the West as the much stronger division that year. Since there were so few interdivision games, this means the West must have really slaughtered the East in those games, so I checked. Yep, there were 14 interdivision games in the NFL in 1965, and the East won only one of them. The Browns were the only East team to finish above 7-7, and their two opponents from the West were the Vikings (7-7) and the Rams (4-10), both of whom the Browns lost to. Nor were the Browns particularly dominant when they did win. They scored just 38 points more than they allowed, though that is skewed by the late-season 42-7 loss to the Rams, where the Browns had already clinched the East and were playing backups. Even with that, this is an 11-3 team playing a historically wimpy schedule and performing more like a 9-5 team while doing it. Had the Browns played in the West, I bet they'd have struggled to finish .500.
How did this happen? The NFL back then, pre-merger with the AFL, had 14 teams, seven in the East division and seven in the West. Teams played 14 games, 12 in their own division and just two against the opposite division. The standings show the West as the much stronger division that year. Since there were so few interdivision games, this means the West must have really slaughtered the East in those games, so I checked. Yep, there were 14 interdivision games in the NFL in 1965, and the East won only one of them. The Browns were the only East team to finish above 7-7, and their two opponents from the West were the Vikings (7-7) and the Rams (4-10), both of whom the Browns lost to. Nor were the Browns particularly dominant when they did win. They scored just 38 points more than they allowed, though that is skewed by the late-season 42-7 loss to the Rams, where the Browns had already clinched the East and were playing backups. Even with that, this is an 11-3 team playing a historically wimpy schedule and performing more like a 9-5 team while doing it. Had the Browns played in the West, I bet they'd have struggled to finish .500.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Welcome Back Collins
Ahh...
Two things on top of my agenda for this fine Wednesday evening: cleaning the bathroom (beginning after I post this) and some Scrabble word practice. Which words? Well, for the past six weeks or so I've focused my study exclusively on the words that are valid in the OWL, which is the list used for the U.S. Nationals and for most club and tournament play in the U.S. However, the next tournaments on my calendar use a larger list, known as Collins or formerly SOWPODS, that is used in English-language Scrabble tournaments outside North America, including the World Championship, where I'll be competing in a couple of months. I usually study with the larger list, using # symbols to indicate which words are good *only* in the larger list.
Every word that's valid in the smaller OWL is also valid in Collins, so at least I don't have to *unlearn* any words to play in Collins tournaments, thank god. I merely have to remember not to play the Collins-only words when I go back to OWL tournaments. I'm usually pretty good about that, though I'm bound to slip here and there. I don't cough up illegal words often; the greater problem for me is thinking of a word and chickening out on it because I think it's Collins-only, and then finding out later, no, it's actually valid in OWL as well.
Not to rehash a debate that has grown endless and tiresome within the competitive Scrabble world (and please don't do so in comments, thanks), but yes, I think this long-lived state of affairs is stupid and that we should have one word list and one supreme governing body for competitive play everywhere. For many reasons I won't bother with here, I'm not holding my breath waiting for this to happen, though the number of opportunities to play the larger list here is growing. I've been playing both lists for years now and will do so as long as I have to in order to play the tournaments I want to play. As to whether this has been bad for my OWL game, well, sure, on balance it doesn't help to have to block out a fourth of the words I know, but I was ranked as high as #7 in North America earlier this year - the OWL list - so I'd say I'm doing all right. My last two Nationals have been subpar, but dictionary issues weren't much of a factor in that.
So now that Nationals is over, I'm welcoming back the rest of the words. EPICIER, LANDRAIL, LISPOUND, ADJIGO, FOREX, IO, SEEDINGS (yes, seriously, it's not good here - what the...?), EMO, ZAKAT, BELONGER, TOISEACH, DETORT, TOYWOMAN, BHAJI, YUFT, GREX, IMPUNDULU, OARIEST, KILLUT, ZONURE, COLETIT and all you others...come on down.
Two things on top of my agenda for this fine Wednesday evening: cleaning the bathroom (beginning after I post this) and some Scrabble word practice. Which words? Well, for the past six weeks or so I've focused my study exclusively on the words that are valid in the OWL, which is the list used for the U.S. Nationals and for most club and tournament play in the U.S. However, the next tournaments on my calendar use a larger list, known as Collins or formerly SOWPODS, that is used in English-language Scrabble tournaments outside North America, including the World Championship, where I'll be competing in a couple of months. I usually study with the larger list, using # symbols to indicate which words are good *only* in the larger list.
Every word that's valid in the smaller OWL is also valid in Collins, so at least I don't have to *unlearn* any words to play in Collins tournaments, thank god. I merely have to remember not to play the Collins-only words when I go back to OWL tournaments. I'm usually pretty good about that, though I'm bound to slip here and there. I don't cough up illegal words often; the greater problem for me is thinking of a word and chickening out on it because I think it's Collins-only, and then finding out later, no, it's actually valid in OWL as well.
Not to rehash a debate that has grown endless and tiresome within the competitive Scrabble world (and please don't do so in comments, thanks), but yes, I think this long-lived state of affairs is stupid and that we should have one word list and one supreme governing body for competitive play everywhere. For many reasons I won't bother with here, I'm not holding my breath waiting for this to happen, though the number of opportunities to play the larger list here is growing. I've been playing both lists for years now and will do so as long as I have to in order to play the tournaments I want to play. As to whether this has been bad for my OWL game, well, sure, on balance it doesn't help to have to block out a fourth of the words I know, but I was ranked as high as #7 in North America earlier this year - the OWL list - so I'd say I'm doing all right. My last two Nationals have been subpar, but dictionary issues weren't much of a factor in that.
So now that Nationals is over, I'm welcoming back the rest of the words. EPICIER, LANDRAIL, LISPOUND, ADJIGO, FOREX, IO, SEEDINGS (yes, seriously, it's not good here - what the...?), EMO, ZAKAT, BELONGER, TOISEACH, DETORT, TOYWOMAN, BHAJI, YUFT, GREX, IMPUNDULU, OARIEST, KILLUT, ZONURE, COLETIT and all you others...come on down.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Gimme that gearshift
What I'm going to do when I get back from Nationals: first, my brother Brian, who lives in St. Louis now, will be visiting here with his family. I've met his wife Kara, but I've not yet met the children in the family. Kara has two from an earlier marriage: a son, Rhodes, who is in college in New Orleans (and unfortunately can't make it to Austin this time), and a daughter, Eve, who is 12. And Brian and Kara have a new baby, too - Mamie is about two months old. Three years ago today I had no nephews or nieces. Now I have six.
After that, time to slow down and reorganize. I've got more things big and small going on right now than I'm comfortable with. Some of that stretching is fine, it's good to have challenges and irons in the fire, but to get and stay happy I've found I need to know where home is and keep it in view. Home for me is a simple life. Few possessions, no drama, not running this way and that trying to keep up. My short-term resolution is that I will not add anything new to my life - no new toys, no new projects, no new obligations - until I sort out what's on the table now.
After that, time to slow down and reorganize. I've got more things big and small going on right now than I'm comfortable with. Some of that stretching is fine, it's good to have challenges and irons in the fire, but to get and stay happy I've found I need to know where home is and keep it in view. Home for me is a simple life. Few possessions, no drama, not running this way and that trying to keep up. My short-term resolution is that I will not add anything new to my life - no new toys, no new projects, no new obligations - until I sort out what's on the table now.
Lefty vs. Righty matchup
This morning, I went out and shot some baskets, as I've done most mornings the past couple of weeks. As I mentioned here before, I've been shooting almost all lefty in an attempt to improve my left-side strength and dexterity. Today, a check on that: I took 50 pairs of shots. The shots varied in distance, angle and type, and each time I took a shot with one hand I then took the same shot with the other.
Results: Lefty 20, Righty 14! This is not a big enough sample size to mean much, but that surprised me. Does a good amount of recent practice on an emerging skill trump an already established skill that hasn't been practiced? Assuming the skill isn't that complex and the established level isn't very high, as in this case, I guess it's possible. I felt almost more comfortable shooting lefty, and that's entirely recent.
I do think it's true that the first lessons often go the furthest. Scrabble is that way - a new player who learns the two-letter words, a smattering of other useful words, and some basic strategy will make a big leap forward. Music is, too: once you get the basic technique of an instrument down, that opens all kinds of doors.
Results: Lefty 20, Righty 14! This is not a big enough sample size to mean much, but that surprised me. Does a good amount of recent practice on an emerging skill trump an already established skill that hasn't been practiced? Assuming the skill isn't that complex and the established level isn't very high, as in this case, I guess it's possible. I felt almost more comfortable shooting lefty, and that's entirely recent.
I do think it's true that the first lessons often go the furthest. Scrabble is that way - a new player who learns the two-letter words, a smattering of other useful words, and some basic strategy will make a big leap forward. Music is, too: once you get the basic technique of an instrument down, that opens all kinds of doors.
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